Black People : Reparations R.I.P

Just a few years ago, at roughly the turn of the millennium, slavery reparations seemed the coming thing. A June 2001 New York Times article reported that the movement to obtain compensation for slaves’ descendants had “taken on substantial force” and was “gaining steam” both in the nation’s universities, abuzz with rallies and study committees, and in the black community generally. All the major black organizations had signed on, including the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Randall Robinson’s The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks had hit bestseller lists in 2000, announcing in impassioned tones the need to rectify “America’s crime against us,” a “black holocaust” that was “far and away the most heinous human rights crime visited upon any group of people in the world over the last five hundred years.” True, whites outside the campus remained heavily opposed, but after the United Church of Christ became the first big multiracial denomination to endorse the notion and the Philadelphia Inquirer called for the creation of a national reparations committee, it was only a matter of time before more whites came on board. Many state and local Democratic politicians started to talk up the idea.

Then: nothing. Today, reparations seem to have completely disappeared from the national agenda. Few mention them any more. What happened?